“DEAR CONGRESS, JUST PLAY DEAD”: TIKTOK’S ABSURD GUIDE TO SURVIVING #LOCKDOWN

This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings, we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performed August–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless Bakhtinian carnival.

Exploring youth citizenship during COVID-19 lockdowns in New Zealand

The research presented in this article explores how young people in New Zealand exercised their citizenship during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Building upon the theoretical concepts of ‘actions’ and ‘acts of citizenship’, this qualitative study draws on data from the experiences of 30 young people aged over 16 in the city of Auckland. Data included classroom observations, focus group interviews, individual interviews and the sharing of student artefacts (e.g. posters and videos). The experiences of the participants covered a wide range of engagement in citizenship rights, sites, scales and acts. Our findings offered an alternative to prevailing portrayals of young people as either passive victims or self-centred troublemakers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons for citizenship education are discussed at the end of the article.

Exploring youth citizenship during COVID-19 lockdowns in New Zealand

The research presented in this article explores how young people in New Zealand exercised their citizenship during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Building upon the theoretical concepts of ‘actions’ and ‘acts of citizenship’, this qualitative study draws on data from the experiences of 30 young people aged over 16 in the city of Auckland. Data included classroom observations, focus group interviews, individual interviews and the sharing of student artefacts (e.g. posters and videos). The experiences of the participants covered a wide range of engagement in citizenship rights, sites, scales and acts. Our findings offered an alternative to prevailing portrayals of young people as either passive victims or self-centred troublemakers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons for citizenship education are discussed at the end of the article.

Young people’s everyday citizenship and understandings of feminism

Contemporary youth citizenship research is challenged with capturing the complexity of young people’s engagement with politics, especially considering the current prevalence of social media. In this article, we address young people’s understandings of political engagement in relation to feminism by drawing on contemporary feminist scholarship. This is combined with qualitative research undertaken in 2016 and 2017 with five focus groups comprising young people from different secondary schools across four New Zealand cities. Exploring this through the lens of everyday citizenship means dealing with the ambiguities around terms and concepts, both for researchers and young people themselves, as well as acknowledging the nuances and tensions concerning what counts as political involvement. The research findings suggest that how educators and youth workers connect and empower diverse groups of young people when navigating the potentially contentious terrain of political positioning, identification and social action requires further investigation.

Young people’s everyday citizenship and understandings of feminism

Contemporary youth citizenship research is challenged with capturing the complexity of young people’s engagement with politics, especially considering the current prevalence of social media. In this article, we address young people’s understandings of political engagement in relation to feminism by drawing on contemporary feminist scholarship. This is combined with qualitative research undertaken in 2016 and 2017 with five focus groups comprising young people from different secondary schools across four New Zealand cities. Exploring this through the lens of everyday citizenship means dealing with the ambiguities around terms and concepts, both for researchers and young people themselves, as well as acknowledging the nuances and tensions concerning what counts as political involvement. The research findings suggest that how educators and youth workers connect and empower diverse groups of young people when navigating the potentially contentious terrain of political positioning, identification and social action requires further investigation.

Fighting Youth Unemployment

The chapter stresses that the transition to a post-industrial society has consequences on the life course, and especially on the transition from childhood to adulthood. However, this transition varies significantly between countries, because of different institutional arrangements. Accordingly, the chapter analyzes these different arrangements of socio-economic institutions, including education, labor market policies, and welfare policies (with student support), by presenting the typology of “youth welfare citizenship regimes.” The second part of the chapter proceeds to four “typical” case studies showing how different growth regimes presented in the first chapter shape these youth welfare citizenship regimes (France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). Then it analyzes how growth strategies (the reforms implemented by governments in order to boost growth and job creation) have recently been influencing the evolution of youth citizenship regimes, especially through reforms of active labor market policies (ALMP) that aim to fight youth unemployment. The argument here is not causal but rather contextual and systemic, and the objective of the case studies is therefore to present the coherence between a growth regime and the way socio-economic institutions structure the entry into adulthood, leading to a specific youth welfare citizenship regime, and how reforms inspired by a specific growth strategy contributes to transform youth welfare regime.

From Political Interest to Participation in EU-related Actions: The Mediating Role of European Identity and Political Efficacy

European youth’s civic engagement and political participation in EU-related issues is a timely imperative. Research findings on youth citizenship range from political apathy to alternative forms of participation, although theoretical evidence remains poor. This study is based on empirical data from the Greek contribution to the European program CATCH-EyoU (Horizon 2020), aiming to explore different forms and predictors of youth’s civic engagement and political participation on EU-related issues. Based on social psychological theoretical background, we assumed that the expressed political interest for the EU translates to specific forms of action. Identification with the EU and perceived political efficacy/alienation were expected to mediate the above relationship. The sample consisted of 749 young adults aged 18-27 (M = 22.2, 50.7% women, 89.7% Greek citizens, 72% university students, 75.5% employed). In addition to voting, four components of political participation and civic engagement were studied, namely conventional participation (in support of political parties and goals), activism (acts of protest against the authorities), online participation (social networks), and volunteering (non-profit actions). Mediation analyses showed that the relationship between political interest and participation can be explained by different mechanisms: The sense of belonging in the EU lead to more frequent electoral participation, but to less activism and online participation. On the contrary, EU identity exploration and reconsideration contributed to increased conventional participation. Political efficacy seemed to promote activism and online participation, while political alienation tended to decrease activism. These findings reveal the multiple connotations of youth’s politicalparticipation regarding EU issues.